I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
Interpretation
The quote reflects how fictional characters can evoke deeper emotional connections than some real people.
Fernando Pessoa expresses the idea that the connections we forge with fictional characters and artistic representations can often be more profound than those we have with real individuals in our lives. He critiques the superficiality of human relationships, likening them to mere physical beings devoid of true emotional substance, suggesting that our bonds with imaginative creations can offer richer experiences than those with 'flesh and blood' humans.
In practice
In a speech about the power of literature, one might reference this quote to illustrate the emotional depth found in storytelling.
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
Remember this: once the human race is established on more than one planet and especially, in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race.
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.
Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.